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Volvo XC60 offers City Safety feature that can stop the car automatically if it detects an object in its path.

Using new technologies to warn drivers about potential crashes and preventing impaired people from driving are key points on a list of recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board to reduce traffic deaths and injuries. The board's list was released Thursday.

Six of the top 10 suggestions involve changes to highway travel, which is where most deaths take place. Plenty of attention is given to substance abuse, driver distraction and crash-avoidance technologies.

In its recommendations, the board suggests lawmakers “mandate motor-vehicle collision-avoidance technologies.” These technologies are currently standard on some luxury cars and optional on other new cars. The aids include lane-departure warning, forward-collision warning, adaptive cruise control (which monitors the speed of the vehicle in front of you and adjusts speed accordingly), automatic braking and electronic stability control. Through its research, the board says these technologies help improve a driver's reaction time, which can help avoid a collision.

Three types of incidents make up the majority of highway crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration:

-- Rear-end crashes, 28 percent

-- Run off the road, 23 percent

-- Lane-change collisions, 9 percent

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that adding just forward-collision-warning technology could help drivers avoid 879 fatal crashes a year for passenger vehicles and 115 fatal crashes a year for large trucks.

"Transportation is safer than ever, but with 35,000 annual fatalities and hundreds of thousands of injuries we can and must do better," NTSB chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman said. "The Most Wanted list is a roadmap to improving safety for all of our nation's travelers."

Certainly, everyone wants safer vehicles. But are we willing to pay the price? None of the advanced technologies touted by the NTSB are cheap. Adding all of them could easily boost the price of any vehicle by several thousand dollars.

Other topics covered in the recommendations include:

-- Eliminating alcohol-impaired driving. The NSTB says 130,000 people have died as a result of crashes caused by substance-impaired driving in the last 10 years.

-- Using new technologies that prevent a car from moving when alcohol is detected.

-- Reducing driver distraction by eliminating the use of any handheld device (a recommendation that has been made before).

The road to these recommendations becoming law is long. But the agencies pushing these changes, which are aimed at state legislators, have a significant amount of pull.